Typical enterprise networks contain a large variety of application and service traffic. It is often useful to know what traffic is flowing across the network, such as for application monitoring systems, network intrusion detection systems and network management tools. However, in many situations, network administrators or others responsible for, or otherwise interested in, monitoring specific applications or services lack knowledge of the exact network location, e.g., IP addresses or port ranges, where such applications or services occur on the network. Configuration of traffic monitoring applications may require such knowledge to effectively monitor the desired traffic.
For the reasons stated above, and for other reasons that will become apparent to those skilled in the art upon reading and understanding the present specification, there is a need in the art for alternative methods and apparatus for discovering network traffic.